I’m excited to share another case study today—this time featuring ZOOK, a manufacturer of rupture disks and pressure-safety devices. If you’re in manufacturing, especially if your business involves any level of engineer-to-order or custom production, this one’s worth your time. This isn’t a story about a company that deployed Business Central out of the box and called it a day. It’s about a manufacturer with genuinely complex requirements who found a way to make Dynamics work for them—first on NAV, and now on their way to Business Central. What Makes ZOOK Different ZOOK doesn’t make thousands of identical widgets. They...
I’ve been watching companies buy expensive third-party mobile applications for Business Central for years now, and I keep asking myself: why? I get it—old habits die hard. For decades, if you wanted warehouse staff scanning barcodes or shop floor workers capturing production data on a tablet, you had to buy something from an ISV. That’s just how it was. But somewhere around Business Central version 23, that stopped being true. Microsoft gave us native barcode scanning, tablet support, and AL extensibility in the standard mobile app—and most people are still acting like it’s 2015. I just came back from the...
I’m excited to share a case study that really captures what I love about working with Business Central in high-volume manufacturing environments. World Emblem has been a Naviona client since 2017, and watching them grow from Dynamics NAV through multiple Business Central upgrades while quadrupling their revenue has taught me a lot about what it takes to scale an ERP system alongside a fast-moving business. The case study attached to this post tells their story, but I wanted to add some context about why their approach worked and what other BC users can learn from it. Because the real story...
It’s the first of the month, and people that are supporting Business Central or any of the former versions such as Navision or Dynamics NAV will tell you that the first of the month is when there is always someone that tries to post a transaction and panics because they get an error message saying something like Posting Date is not within your range of allowed posting dates in Gen. Journal Line Journal Template Name=’GENERAL’,Journal Batch Name=’DAILY’,Line No.=’10000′. Its been like since I started working with this software 24 years ago. There have been many ways to work around this,...
The Scenario to Solve Here’s a scenario I’ve seen play out more times than I can count: A planner runs Calculate Plan on a Monday morning. The worksheet populates with 200+ action messages. Maybe they’re tired, maybe they’re in a hurry, but they select all the lines and hit “Carry Out Action Message”. Twenty minutes later, the purchasing manager is looking at 75 new purchase orders—some for long lead-time items, some to vendors that haven’t been qualified yet, and at least a few that duplicate existing open orders. Cue the panic, the finger-pointing, and the Monday afternoon spent manually deleting...
The Problem: Large ERP Methodology for Smaller Companies I’ve been implementing Business Central (earlier Microsoft Dynamics NAV) for larger and more complex manufacturing companies for the last 20+ years. It has almost exclusively been implementation where custom tailored processes where combined with industry best practices. Each project typically follows an established path taking the customer through Discovery, Analysis, Design, Development, Deployment and ending with post go-live Support. This method works well for larger companies but has proven hard to apply to smaller companies. From time to time I run into someone with a small company that wants to transition to...
I’ve been implementing Business Central (and Dynamics NAV before that) for manufacturing companies for over two decades now. And in almost every single implementation, at some point during the requirements workshops, someone from quality or operations asks: “Can the system handle quality inspections?” The answer used to be: “Not really, not out of the box. We’ll need an add-on for that.” Well, that changes with Business Central version 28. Microsoft has added native quality management functionality, and from what I can see in the early access preview, it’s not just a checkbox feature—it actually looks great 🙂 , it is...
As we all know, Microsoft is adding Copilot features to everything these days. Every new version of Business Central has more Copilot than the last version and soon there is not a single place in the application that does not have a Copilot feature. This is great and most people are excited about it. The Copilot features and the underlying AI capabilities are what get people talking when we present Business Central to customers. Most of what I work with are manufacturing companies and almost all of them have their own AI initiatives, sometimes those are just around being creative...
10+ years ago I created a Record Deletion tool for Dynamics NAV that I published here on my blog. It was a tool that could be used to clean up test transactions in a company in Dynamics NAV, and it quickly became very popular. People have reach out to about getting this tool available for Business Central (I also think some have done the work of converting this tool into a BC extension themselves). So here we go; it is now available via AppSource and can be accessed for FREE here: Record Deletion Tool for Business Central The functionality is...
Most of us that’s been programming in Dynamics NAV for a while are aware of the Excel Buffer table. It is a super useful table that can be used to create and read Excel files from C/AL code. This table have been around as far as I remember, and now it has some siblings, the XML Buffer and CSV Buffer tables. The concept is the same, a table with functions to create or read files, this time XML/CSV files instead of Excel files. Just like with the Excel Buffer table, the XML buffer and CSV buffer table should be used...
